HDS blends virtualization with thin provisioning

In a move aimed at the ongoing data deluge and datacenter I/O bottlenecks today's enterprises face, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has revamped its storage virtualization strategy in the form of the Hitachi USP (Universal Storage Platform) V, adding thin provisioning to the mix.

The unit -- which supports 247 petabytes of virtualized storage capacity -- delivers 3.5 million IOPS and increases the virtualized storage port performance of its predecessor, the TagmaStore USP, by as much as 500 percent, according to the company.

The key, said Hu Yoshida, vice president and CTO of HDS, is the company's approach to virtualization.

"We're taking storage virtualization to the next dimension," Yoshida said. "What other people have done is they've gone to the storage-area network to do virtualization. Unfortunately, that's the wrong place to do the virtualization, because in the network you don't have any information about what the server wants to do or how to move the storage."

Rather than create a virtualization layer within the enterprise SAN, the Hitachi USP V, which includes 4Gbps Fibre Channel connectivity from its directors to its disks and 32GB of cache, creates a virtualized abstraction layer within the control unit, thereby enabling the product to deliver storage services such as replication and increase the performance of existing storage assets, Yoshida said.

"Because we put a very high-performance cache in front, because of the pathing capability we have in the storage ports, and because of the performance of our connection to the external storage, we can actually enhance the performance of the storage we attach behind our controller, regardless of who makes it," Yoshida said.

The USP V, which connects to existing, heterogeneous storage assets by way of 57,120 virtual ports, also provides a locus for injecting additional storage-related services into the virtualized pool, Yoshida said.

"The most you can do when you do virtualization in the network is manage volumes," Yoshida said. "Our take is that you need to do much more, like replication, tiered storage, life cycle management. We're doing that in the control unit, not in the network on a set of appliances."

Chief among the functionality offered in this iteration of Hitachi's USP line is thin provisioning, which allows admins to earmark capacities for applications without having to set aside the requisite physical storage before it is actually needed. This functionality prevents enterprises from having to overprovision storage assets and thus delay hardware purchases until absolutely necessary.

"We're able to give physical storage to the applications as they need it," Yoshida said. "So, we take away the guesswork."

By reducing the number of disks required to meet applications' storage needs, the USP V's thin provisioning has an additional impact in reducing an enterprise's energy consumption, HDS said.

According to an ITCentrix study, the HDS USP V consumes 50 percent less power, cooling, and space over a five year period when compared with competing systems.